How Chef Works

"Chef's biggest advantage is the amount of time we save in setting
up virtual servers and other tasks."

Leandro Reox, Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Cloud Architect

"Four months ago we spent more time on maintenance. Now we are doing
a lot more innovation. Chef is exceeding our expectations and we are
looking forward to leveraging Chef for future projects."

Ian Meyer, Technical Operations Manager

"Chef gives us agility. If we want to start developing a new system
tomorrow, by noon we can put every infrastructure piece in place and
be ready to go."

Gabor Veszi Infrastructure Lead, Prezi

"Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our
scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow."

Phil Dibowitz Production Engineer, Facebook

How Chef works

Chef turns infrastructure into code. With Chef, you can automate how
you build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure. Your infrastructure
becomes as versionable, testable, and repeatable as application code.

Chef relies on reusable definitions known as recipes to automate
infrastructure tasks. Examples of recipes are instructions for
configuring web servers, databases and load balancers. Together,
recipes describe what your infrastructure consists of and how each
part of your infrastructure should be deployed, configured and
managed.

Recipes use building blocks called resources. A resource describes
some piece of infrastructure, such as a file, a template, or a package
to be installed. You can use the many resources included in Chef, or
create your own to manage unique configurations and legacy systems.

The Chef server stores your recipes as well as other configuration
data. The Chef client is installed on each node in your network. A
node can be a physical server, a virtual server or a container
instance. The Chef client periodically polls the Chef server for the
latest recipes and checks to see if the node is in compliance with the
policy defined by these recipes. If the node is out of date, the Chef
client runs them on the node to bring it up to date.

Replication

With replication, you can use a single Chef server as a central
location for developing policy. Other Chef servers in other geographic
areas periodically poll the primary for any changes. They stay current
with your latest cookbooks, environments, roles and databags. Maintain
a single worldview across multiple locations and ensure consistency
across your network, no matter how many data centers or cloud
availability zones you use in your enterprise.

Analytics Platform

Get visibility into your Chef servers, verify compliance and keep up
with changes, all with the Chef analytics platform. See what's
happening on your Chef server in real time with action logs. Use the
information to enforce compliance with your company's policies.
Integrate the data with your favorite external systems, such as
HipChat. Notify the relevant people or automated tools about changes
to the Chef server so that they can react in real time.

Management Console

Use the web-based management console to control access to objects,
such as nodes and cookbooks, through RBAC. You can also edit and
delete nodes, and reset private keys. Keep up to date with what's
happening during chef client runs across an entire organization or on
specific nodes.

Hosted Chef

Let us manage your Chef server. Take advantage of hosted Chef, our
powerful SaaS offering, and hand the work over to us. You can manage 5
nodes for free. If you have a Chef subscription, hosted Chef is
available to you at no additional charge.